"When the object of the artist's gaze is the intimate other, the marriage of two minds is made in the studio. "
Currentlly on exhibition at hughes (by appointment)
Richard and Pat Larter met in 1951 and married in 1953 - he was 24, she only 17 - and moved from England to Australia in 1962. Mother to their five children and his best friend until her untimely death in 1996, Pat was his model and collaborator. An artist in her own right, Pat is arguably “one of the most painted, drawn, and filmed artist–partners in the entire history of art”, but the crown of most photographed belongs perhaps to Marie, wife and muse of the self-taught, visionary American artist Eugene Von Bruenchenhein.
Working in obscurity in Milwaukee only a decade earlier, Von Bruenchenhein created prolifically and eclectically, working with whatever materials were on hand. He painted on cardboard with hand-made brushes, made ceramics with clay collected at construction sites, and built intricate sculptures out of chicken bones. But his most endearing and lyrical works are his photographs of his wife, Marie.
Eugene met Eveline Kalke in 1939 at a state fair in Wisconsin, he was 29, she 19. Nicknamed ‘Marie', she became the central focus of his earliest work, posing for thousands of photographs in their home studio. Marie wore crowns and jewellery he’d fashioned from scavenged Christmas ornaments and flowers, and her own home-made outfits. Before makeshift sets in their living room, Marie transformed under Eugene’s gaze to becomes a fantasy queen, erotic temptress and coyly confronts the viewer to question the relationship between photographer and subject, husband and wife, artist and muse, playfully reinterpreting movie starlet and risqué pin-up girl aesthetics. With the simplest of means, they created imagined scenarios far removed from their modest circumstances. Theirs was a shared passionate engagement with the work, as it was for Pat and ‘Dick’ Larter.
Larter's many sexually explicit images of his wife reveal their shared interest in freedom of expression and frustration with moralistic censorious attitudes to the body. However he also depicted Pat’s introspective, thoughtful and tender moods, mapping her passage from youth to maturity, from model to active performer, collaborator and artist.
In the 1970s, when feminism was opening up many possibilities for women artists, Pat came into her own. She relished sending up stereotypes, recognising that by taking control of representations of the body, issues of identity and sexuality could be critiqued and enjoyed and celebrated. She was Australia’s main contributor to mail art, an art form with its roots in the anti-establishment approach of dada and the Fluxus group which came to the fore in the 1960s and 1970s. Artists from around the world sent their work through the postal system to each other and Pat’s self-portraits, jokes and philosophical asides were included in all the significant international mail art catalogues from the 1970s to 1991. Larter went on to become one of the most enduring and recognisable painters of his generation, with Pat’s cheeky ‘trade-mark’ gap-toothed visage grinning, scowling, screaming and laughing down from museum walls throughout Australia.
Richard and Pat developed a quite particular artistic partnership in which Pat participated in his work as an active performer, dancing from one pose to the next in the one painting. Although Richard often took the photographs, Pat chose the poses, the theatrical personae, and the outfits which, like Marie, she usually made herself.
The performative aspect of Marie’s engagement with Von Bruenchenhein’s photography, suggests that like Pat, Marie is a participant in the creative process. Their intimacy is clearly visible in the glowing warmth of Marie’s gaze back at Eugene (her muse) behind the camera. Both are equally engaged in their artistic collaboration, she finding props and drapery in second hand markets, sewing costumes, arranging backdrops and then ‘becoming’ the actor in their own mise-en-scene; he finding the view, adjusting the light. And then, skin on red-lit skin in the close, vinegar tinged air of their cramped darkroom, they wait in anticipation of the emergent images of their shared imagination - these magical photographs.
Now a prominent figure in the world of “self-taught” art, Von Bruenchenhein remained anonymous to the larger artistic community for the duration of his career. Remarkably, he produced thousands of works within the confines of their home studio. During his lifetime, only close friends and family knew of their existence, although he repeatedly approached local galleries to no avail. It was only after his death on January 24, 1983 that the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, began cataloguing the entire collection.
Marie, who had kept it all in her tender care finally saw her younger self gazing back at her from he walls of the Kohler center’s first ever exhibit of Von Bruenchenhein's work inn 1984
Now, Von Bruenchenhein's work is garnering newfound attention. Notably, in 2010 Von Bruenchenhein’s work received its first in-depth museum exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum, entitled Eugene Von Bruenchenhein: Freelance Artist—Poet and Sculptor—Inovator—Arrow maker and Plant man—Bone artifacts constructor—Photographer and Architect—Philosopher which displayed over 125 of Von Bruenchenhein’s photographs, sculptures, paintings, and drawings.
Annette Hughes
Paraphrased from: Hart, Deborah and Joanna Mendelssohn. Richard Larter. Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2008.
